Before The World

Before the world turned illiterate, and the country I live in went to war with everything, ostensibly to bring democracy, or liberate people, or some other narrative we all knew was false, but went along with it anyway, because those big overarching narratives feel better than the truth, & we all know how slippery the truth is, especially when it’s covered in oil, and blood,  and the ritual judgment of solemn faces give lies the gravitas of truth, and they do it in public, on TV, and that’s all anyone needs, a beefy simulacrum, like that word I’ve been hearing all my life, democracy, and freedom, those sacred shibboleths, ever since grade school, long before the era of mass shootings, when we rose to chant the pledge of allegiance, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. That time. The time before iPhones. Before Androids. Before YouTube and American Idol and the books were donated to nursing homes or boxed and put in the garage. And Walter Cronkite looked into a camera to say the president was dead. And David Foster Wallace hung himself from a beam on his back porch in Claremont, California. And Julian Assange was put in a cell at Belmarsh awaiting extradition to the United States. And hundreds of thousands of bookstores have closed. And high school graduates entering college can’t identify the subject of a sentence. And banning books has become a national pastime. And Fahrenheit 451 has become a reality. And a few keep going. Keep putting it out there. Though there is no “out there.” What is out there is still out there. But it’s a place of guns, not books.